Mr Glyn's Pickups 'Bellbird' demo

 

If you don't know Andy Marra from Christchurch and his beautiful guitar playing here's your chance:

 

 

 

https://mrglynspickups.com/2020/03/29/bellbird-vintage-strat-set/

The Stratocaster has been around since 1954 and the legend continues. Reading the internet (!?) tells me there have been good and bad years or decades, guitars to avoid and ones worth hundreds of thousands of dollars. I’ve been repairing guitars since 1995 so I’ve played a lot of old Strats and analysed a lot of old pickups. Vintage pickups aren’t all great but the good ones are fantastic.

I’ve based my Vintage Strat set on the best of the old pickups I’ve had the pleasure of playing through . So I use AWG42 heavy formvar insulated wire – there’s something about the thickness of that insulation that just works with an old Strat pickup.

I’ve aimed for that old quacking chime that makes Strats wonderfully percussive but with a singing quality that’s so musical. Warm and clear with beautiful almost reverb-like clean tones – that’s what I want out of an old Strat. The neck needs to be fat, round and clear, the middle pickup needs to quack and the bridge a cut through twang without thinness. The all important ‘in between’ sounds in positions 2 and 4 must be balanced and characterful. Nothing says Strat more than these sounds.

The Bellbird set has been designed mainly for clean tones but they’re certainly not afraid to perform with a bit of gain. As part of a HSS set they’re great with one of my ‘Integrity’ humbuckers in the bridge position.

MrGlyn’s Pickups Bellbird demo

 Thanks to Jason Herbert for managing to use all 5 positions in the funkiest minute you’ll ever experience in this MrGlyn’s Pickups Bellbird demo.

The Bellbird pickup set is a vintage voiced Strat set reminiscent of the early 60's Fender pickups.

The Stratocaster has been around since 1954 and the legend continues. Reading the internet (!?) tells me there have been good and bad years or decades, guitars to avoid and ones worth hundreds of thousands of dollars. I’ve been repairing guitars since 1995 so I’ve played a lot of old Strats and analysed a lot of old pickups. Vintage pickups aren’t all great but the good ones are fantastic.

I’ve based my Vintage Strat set on the best of the old pickups I’ve had the pleasure of playing through . So I use AWG42 heavy formvar insulated wire – there’s something about the thickness of that insulation that just works with an old Strat pickup.

I’ve aimed for that old quacking chime that makes Strats wonderfully percussive but with a singing quality that’s so musical. Warm and clear with beautiful almost reverb-like clean tones – that’s what I want out of an old Strat. The neck needs to be fat, round and clear, the middle pickup needs to quack and the bridge a cut through twang without thinness. The all important ‘in between’ sounds in positions 2 and 4 must be balanced and characterful. Nothing says Strat more than these sounds.

The Bellbird set has been designed mainly for clean tones but they’re certainly not afraid to perform with a bit of gain. As part of a HSS set they’re great with one of my ‘Integrity’ humbuckers in the bridge position.

www.mrglynspickups.com

"Attitude" Humbucker Demo

A huge thanks to Gabe at The Music Academy Papamoa for his "Attitude" Humbucker Demo.

Mr Glyn's Attitude Humbucker Set

For a while I’ve been working on extending my range of humbucking pickups for rock players. The Cloud Nine will do just about anything but I wanted to offer a more specific pickup for modern rock/metal.

I decided to start with a 7 string which is a slightly unorthodox way of going about it but I was concerned with getting the bottom end right. If there was any sogginess in the bottom end a 7 string would show it up more than a 6 string.

7 string pickups are not like others. The low bass string reacts so differently, there’s a lot of string deflection and low harmonics. My mission was to tame this bass and keep it tight but not to sacrifice the sound quality of the treble strings. The treble still needed to be sweet and singing. The mids needed to be balanced and noticeable. I didn’t want this pickup scooped; the mids had to stand out from the mix when needed to.

So in October 2019 I got back in touch with my old mate Graham Young in Yorkshire. He’s an amazing player and really knows his gear.

Back in 1998 I wound a 6 string humbucker for Graham. In those days I had a guitar shop and repair business in Leeds in the North of England and he wanted a bridge pickup to suit his style for a parts caster.

Years passed and he became a 7 string player, so when I decided to develop a 7 string pickup Graham was the person I asked to be test pilot. We’d very loosely kept in touch over the years and it turned out he was still using the 6 string pickup I’d made for him back in the 90’s.

We had a chat via messenger and it turned out he’d tried a lot of pickups but none quite did it for him. So I listened to his thoughts, came up with a design and went away and made a prototype.

The first one wasn’t quite right, so he sent it back and I changed a few things and returned it. I don’t know how many adjustments I made but that pickup accumulated quite a few air miles between NZ and the UK over the next few months.

Every time we got closer, every adjustment less than the one before. When you get that close you know you’ve got a good pickup. I was at the point when I felt we really had something great but I just needed that confirmation.

Then Covid 19 happened, the mail got too unreliable to send stuff overseas with any confidence of it arriving and the process was put on hold.

At the end of June 2020 I got a call from Gabe Dovaston in Papamoa. He’d done some demos for me with some of my other pickups and was asking if I did a 7 string, just in case, for an Ibanez of his. Well, this seemed like a chance to test my new pickup on fresh ears. I made a copy of the last one I’d sent Graham, the one I was happy with, and got it off in the post. I sat back and waited. It only took a few days and I got a very happy call, he loved it and he’d already made a demo that he’d put on YouTube.

Great news, but what was I going to call it? The pickup was already on YouTube, it wasn’t on my website yet and it didn’t even have a name!

I got on Facebook and asked people to come up with a name; there were so many excellent suggestions but nothing quite did it. In the end this pickup that had taken so much work to develop, traveled so far and refused to go away I called the “Attitude”.

The Attitude is available in 6 and 7 string, for neck and bridge positions.

Stratocaster Pickup re-wind.

A customer brought me a 'dead' Strat style pickup the other day. It's out of an 80's Yamaha but its identical to a Fender in design.

I see quite a few old Fender pickups that have suddenly started to sound thin and quiet. It's a common problem, the insulation breaks down over time shorting out the pickup. 

The fate of this pickup was sealed when it's owner decided to adjust the pole piece height. It has the vintage style staggered poles, they are not adjustable, if you push them in it will sheer of a load of wires and kill the pickup. 

I like pickups, I like rewinding them. It's such simple high school physics but so fundamental to electric guitars.

 A pickup is simply a magnet with a coil of very thin wire wrapped around it. If you pass something ferrous through the magnetic field (a vibrating string) it disturbs the field causing electrons in the coil to move - that' electricity. It's not much electricity but amplify it a couple of times and you've got stadium ROCK. Cool eh.

To make a pickup sound good is rather more complicated, in fact, rather surprisingly so considering the basic principle is straight forward.

I tested the pickup and the meter showed it was dead. Before snipping all the windings off I just re-solder the wire terminals just in case of dry joints, this does sometimes fix it , worth a go.

In order to re-wind it I need to cut off the old windings. The wire is as fine as hair (I'm judging by my own) and there are thousands of turns of it. I'm careful not to damage the bobbin while doing this. Any little nicks can catch on the new windings and ruin an otherwise good rewind.

The old windings are off now and you can see what happened.
The two highest pole pieces that were pushed down have torn the protective tape and sneered off some of the turns.

You can see what a simple structure a Fender pickup is. Each of the 6 lugs is an alnico magnet press fitted into vulcanised fibre board. I use a blade to scrape off any excess wax and smooth out any high points.

 I seep very thin superglue into the magnet/fibreboard joints just to be sure it's all still strong.

I replace the tape with some thinner stuff. The tape increases the life of a pickup by preventing the inner windings from shorting out on the pole piece. I use really thin tape to keep the inner windings as close as possible to the magnet. There's a lot of high end clarity that comes from these inner windings. This pickup is ready for the winding machine.

I mount the pickup to the machine with an extra little block to keep the underside straight. Some vintage pickups can get a bit bendy without this support when winding.

I anchor the wire by wrapping it through the lug 4 or 5 times.

 I prefer to wind with a combination of scatter winding by hand and machine winding. I've tried so many different ways over the last 20 years, this works best for me.

Here's the finished coil. You can see it looks slightly uneven, that's intentional. If you wind a pickup too neatly it sounds a bit dull. An element of randomness creates a loose, open clarity. 

I've wound this one with 8500 turns of 42AWG wire. It's come out at 6.2 KOhms which was about what I wanted. This is a bridge pickup and the other two are 5.6KOhms wound with the same gauge wire. So it should match in well.

I wax pot it to prevent micro phonic feedback

 And we're done - this Strat pickup lives to ROCK another day

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Feel free to contact me, mrglynspickps@gmail.com

Hofner Pickup re-wind

I had a visit from Paul Crowther the other day (always a pleasure to see him). He's rather a legend for amongst other things his 'Hotcake' overdrive pedals and the 'Prunes and Custard' (my favorite for theremin).

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Emlyn_Crowther

 He wanted to know if my coil winding machine was up and running -  he had an interesting pickup for me to wind.

 Its an old Hofner pickup which I guess is from the 50's. The guitar has 3 of them and this one has a break in the windings so needs to be re-wound.
This would normally be a straight forward job except for the design of this pickup.

 This is the inside of it. The windings (around the outside) are not wrapped around a bobbin. They are just sitting in the pickup and have been wrapped in tape to protect them. In the middle you can see the magnets sitting in a hard putty. There are incidentally only 5 magnets.
 So the problem Paul left me with was how to wrap about 5000 turns of extremely thin wire into a coil and therefore make a pickup.
 After a long brainstorming session with Sheena we came up with a plan.

 We figured that the wire had to be wound around a bobbin and then somehow the bobbin removed.

 So I made this bobbin. The sides are plastic from a Strat pickguard (white) and the centre has been carved from candle wax.

The bobbin bolts together and is attached to another plastic plate which in turn fits to the winding machine.
 The idea is to wind the pickup on this and then warm the completed coil up and melt the wax. The wax should seep into the coil thus potting it as well. Then the sides can be unbolted and voila a copy of the original coil.

 Winding the coil wasn't any different from any other pickup - so now for the tricky bit.

 I warm the coil ever so gently with a heat gun. I put my free hand next to the work to judge the temperature - if it gets too hot the plastic will melt and I'll be starting again.

 When I see some wax oozing out I ever so gently remove the top plate.

 With the wax exposed I can apply more heat and watch it flow into the coil and as it cools becomes solid.

Then I wrap tape around it to hold everything in place. I cannot emphasize enough how fiddly this is. There are a few stray wires and if any of them break I'm starting again.

It may not be much to look at but its taken hours. The slight curve is to match the shape of the pickup casing. I've tested it and I'm pleased with it at 5.5Kohms.
 In the background you can see the magnetic lugs - I had to dig them out of the putty.

 I put the whole thing back together using 'friendly plastic' instead of putty then fill the casing with wax, solder the back on and its finished.

 Its been quite a task but I'm happy with the result.

   Glyn



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I am no longer repairing guitars - since covid 19 I now work full time making pickups

www.mrglynspickups.com